Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
6,288
result(s) for
"Matthews, R"
Sort by:
Fleet inquisitor
\"An Exchange of Hostages, Prisoner of Conscience and Angel of Destruction in one volume. Under Jurisdiction torture isn't about the truth. It's about terror. The Jurisdiction's Bench has come to rely on the institutionalized atrocities of the Protocols to maintain its control of an increasingly unstable political environment. When Andrej Koscuisko, a talented young doctor, reports to orientation as a Ship's Inquisitor he will discover in himself something far worse than a talent for torturing the Bench's enemies. He will confront a passion for the exercise of the Writ to Inquire, whose intensity threatens to consume him utterly\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Communicating the deadly consequences of global warming for human heat stress
In December of 2015, the international community pledged to limit global warming to below 2 °C above preindustrial (PI) to prevent dangerous climate change. However, to what extent, and for whom, is danger avoided if this ambitious target is realized? We address these questions by scrutinizing heat stress, because the frequency of extremely hot weather is expected to continue to rise in the approach to the 2 °C limit. We use analogs and the extreme South Asian heat of 2015 as a focusing event to help interpret the increasing frequency of deadly heat under specified amounts of global warming. Using a large ensemble of climate models, our results confirm that global mean air temperature is nonlinearly related to heat stress, meaning that the same future warming as realized to date could trigger larger increases in societal impacts than historically experienced. This nonlinearity is higher for heat stress metrics that integrate the effect of rising humidity. We show that, even in a climate held to 2 °C above PI, Karachi (Pakistan) and Kolkata (India) could expect conditions equivalent to their deadly 2015 heatwaves every year. With only 1.5 °C of global warming, twice as many megacities (such as Lagos, Nigeria, and Shanghai, China) could become heat stressed, exposing more than 350 million more people to deadly heat by 2050 under a midrange population growth scenario. The results underscore that, even if the Paris targets are realized, there could still be a significant adaptation imperative for vulnerable urban populations.
Journal Article
Using a long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network to boost river streamflow forecasts over the western United States
Accurate river streamflow forecasts are a vital tool in the fields of water security, flood preparation and agriculture, as well as in industry more generally. Traditional physics-based models used to produce streamflow forecasts have become increasingly sophisticated, with forecasts improving accordingly. However, the development of such models is often bound by two soft limits: empiricism – many physical relationships are represented empirical formulae; and data sparsity – long time series of observational data are often required for the calibration of these models. Artificial neural networks have previously been shown to be highly effective at simulating non-linear systems where knowledge of the underlying physical relationships is incomplete. However, they also suffer from issues related to data sparsity. Recently, hybrid forecasting systems, which combine the traditional physics-based approach with statistical forecasting techniques, have been investigated for use in hydrological applications. In this study, we test the efficacy of a type of neural network, the long short-term memory (LSTM), at predicting streamflow at 10 river gauge stations across various climatic regions of the western United States. The LSTM is trained on the catchment-mean meteorological and hydrological variables from the ERA5 and Global Flood Awareness System (GloFAS)–ERA5 reanalyses as well as historical streamflow observations. The performance of these hybrid forecasts is evaluated and compared with the performance of both raw and bias-corrected output from the Copernicus Emergency Management Service (CEMS) physics-based GloFAS. Two periods are considered, a testing phase (June 2019 to June 2020), during which the models were fed with ERA5 data to investigate how well they simulated streamflow at the 10 stations, and an operational phase (September 2020 to October 2021), during which the models were fed forecast variables from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) Integrated Forecasting System (IFS), to investigate how well they could predict streamflow at lead times of up to 10 d. Implications and potential improvements to this work are discussed. In summary, this is the first time an LSTM has been used in a hybrid system to create a medium-range streamflow forecast, and in beating established physics-based models, shows promise for the future of neural networks in hydrological forecasting.
Journal Article
Thomas Kuhn and Science Education
Beginning 60 years ago, Thomas Kuhn has had a significant impact across the academy and on culture more widely. And he had a great impact on science education research, theorising, and pedagogy. For the majority of educators, the second edition (1970) of his
Structure of Scientific Revolutions
(Kuhn,
1970a
) articulated the very nature of the science, the discipline they were teaching. More particularly, Kuhn’s book directly influenced four burgeoning research fields in science education: Children’s Conceptual Change, Constructivism, Science-Technology-Society studies, and Cultural Studies of Science Education. This paper looks back to the Kuhnian years in science education and to the long shadow they cast. The discipline of science education needs to learn from its past so that comparable mistakes might be averted in the future. Kuhn’s influence was good and bad. Good, that he brought HPS to so many; bad, that, on key points, his account of science was flawed. This paper will document the book’s two fundamental errors: namely, its Kantian-influenced ontological idealism and its claims of incommensurability between competing paradigms. Both had significant flow-on effects. Although the book had many positive features, this paper will document how most of these ideas and insights were well established in HPS literature at the time of its 1962 publication. Kuhn was not trained in philosophy, he was not part of the HPS tradition, and to the detriment of all, he did not engage with it. This matters, because before publication he could have abandoned, modified, or refined much of his ‘revolutionary’ text. Something that he subsequently did, but this amounted to closing the gate after the horse had bolted. In particular, the education horse had well and truly bolted. While educators were rushing to adopt Kuhn, many philosophers, historians, and sociologists were rejecting him. Kuhn did modify and ‘walk back’ many of the head-turning, but erroneous, claims of
Structure.
But his retreat went largely unnoticed in education, and so the original, deeply flawed
Structure
affected the four above-mentioned central research fields. The most important lesson to be learnt from science education’s uncritical embrace of Kuhn and Kuhnianism is that the problems arose not from personal inadequacies; individuals are not to blame. There was a systematic, disciplinary deficiency. This needs to be addressed by raising the level of philosophical competence in the discipline, beginning with the inclusion of HPS in teacher education and graduate programmes.
Journal Article
Star destroyers : big ships blowing things up
\"In space, size matters. Boomers. Ships of the Line. Star Destroyers. The bigger the ship, the better the bang. From the dawn of history onward, commanding the most powerful ship around has been a dream of admirals, sultans, emperors, kings, generalissimos, and sea captains everywhere. For what the intimidation factor alone doesn't achieve, a massive barrage from super-weapons probably will. Thus it was, and ever shall be, even into the distant future. From the oceans of Earth, to beneath the ice of Europa, to the distant reaches of galactic empires, it is the great warships and their crews that sometimes keep civilization safe for the rest of us -- but sometimes become an extinction-level event in and of themselves\"--Back cover.
Book
Antimicrobial Resistance in the Food Chain: Trends, Mechanisms, Pathways, and Possible Regulation Strategies
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) remains of major interest for different types of food stakeholders since it can negatively impact human health on a global scale. Antimicrobial-resistant bacteria and/or antimicrobial resistance genes (transfer in pathogenic bacteria) may contaminate food at any stage, from the field to retail. Research demonstrates that antimicrobial-resistant bacterial infection(s) occur more frequently in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) than in developed countries. Worldwide, foodborne pathogens are a primary cause of morbidity and mortality. The spread of pathogenic bacteria from food to consumers may occur by direct or indirect routes. Therefore, an array of approaches both at the national and international level to control the spread of foodborne pathogens and promote food safety and security are essential. Zoonotic microbes can spread through the environment, animals, humans, and the food chain. Antimicrobial drugs are used globally to treat infections in humans and animals and prophylactically in production agriculture. Research highlights that foods may become contaminated with AMR bacteria (AMRB) during the continuum from the farm to processing to retail to the consumer. To mitigate the risk of AMRB in humans, it is crucial to control antibiotic use throughout food production, both for animal and crop agriculture. The main inferences of this review are (1) routes by which AMRB enters the food chain during crop and animal production and other modes, (2) prevention and control steps for AMRB, and (3) impact on human health if AMR is not addressed globally. A thorough perspective is presented on the gaps in current systems for surveillance of antimicrobial use in food production and/ or AMR in the food chain.
Journal Article
10-Year Follow-up of Intensive Glucose Control in Type 2 Diabetes
This trial was conducted to determine whether the reduction in microvascular risk and improved glycemic control that had been observed with medical therapy, as compared with conventional dietary treatment, in patients with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes was sustained during 10 years of follow-up. Despite an early loss of glycemic differences, continued microvascular risk reduction and emergent risk reductions for myocardial infarction and death from any cause were observed.
Despite an early loss of glycemic differences, continued microvascular risk reduction and emergent risk reductions for myocardial infarction and death from any cause were observed.
The United Kingdom Prospective Diabetes Study (UKPDS), a randomized, prospective, multicenter trial, showed that intensive glucose therapy in patients with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes mellitus was associated with a reduced risk of clinically evident microvascular complications and a nonsignificant reduction of 16% in the relative risk of myocardial infarction (P=0.052).
1
In patients whose body weight was more than 120% of their ideal weight
2
and who primarily received metformin, reductions in the risk of myocardial infarction of 39% (P=0.01) and of death from any cause of 36% (P=0.01) were observed. The results of the UKPDS, which were published in 1998, . . .
Journal Article
Overriding water table control on managed peatland greenhouse gas emissions
Global peatlands store more carbon than is naturally present in the atmosphere
1
,
2
. However, many peatlands are under pressure from drainage-based agriculture, plantation development and fire, with the equivalent of around 3 per cent of all anthropogenic greenhouse gases emitted from drained peatland
3
–
5
. Efforts to curb such emissions are intensifying through the conservation of undrained peatlands and re-wetting of drained systems
6
. Here we report eddy covariance data for carbon dioxide from 16 locations and static chamber measurements for methane from 41 locations in the UK and Ireland. We combine these with published data from sites across all major peatland biomes. We find that the mean annual effective water table depth (WTD
e
; that is, the average depth of the aerated peat layer) overrides all other ecosystem- and management-related controls on greenhouse gas fluxes. We estimate that every 10 centimetres of reduction in WTD
e
could reduce the net warming impact of CO
2
and CH
4
emissions (100-year global warming potentials) by the equivalent of at least 3 tonnes of CO
2
per hectare per year, until WTD
e
is less than 30 centimetres. Raising water levels further would continue to have a net cooling effect until WTD
e
is within 10 centimetres of the surface. Our results suggest that greenhouse gas emissions from peatlands drained for agriculture could be greatly reduced without necessarily halting their productive use. Halving WTD
e
in all drained agricultural peatlands, for example, could reduce emissions by the equivalent of over 1 per cent of global anthropogenic emissions.
Halving average drainage depths in agricultural peatlands could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the equivalent of 1 per cent of all anthropogenic emissions.
Journal Article